Lisa O'Connell

Vicars and Squires: Religion and the Rise of the English Marriage Plot

This paper re-historicises the eighteenth-century marriage plot by shifting attention away from both the history of literary genres and the modes of social history that have generally informed accounts of the rise of the novel. Drawing instead on recent historiography of the periods religious-political currents, I argue that the novels marriage plot emerged as a cultural agent of the Erastian state, or, more concretely as an expression of two different strains of opposition to the Court Whigs and their policies. In its Richardsonian form (Pamela), it belonged to a High Church missionary project that viewed the Anglican wedding ceremony as a tool in the resacrilization of everyday life, and in its Fieldingesque form (Joseph Andrews) it inaugurated a literature that placed the country parish, and, more particularly, negotiations between vicars and squires, at the heart of an imagined English nation. I conclude by suggesting that the English marriage plot finds its original conditions of possibility exactly where Richardsons and Fieldings fictions intersect. That is, where English theopolitics produced a Christian literature committed to emulative fictions on the one side, and a literature committed to the parish-based imaginary of a certain nostalgic English nationalism on the other.

Matrimonial Ceremonies Displayed: Popular Ethnography and Enlightened Imperialism

Spearheaded by Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, English marriage reform of the mid eighteenth century changed both the concept and practice of marriage. Indeed, it enabled marriage to become a pivot for new relations between government and the lives of citizens. This transformation was achieved not through sweeping legislative reform, nor by a usurpation of the church’s traditional role in the formalization of weddings, but by a redefinition of the English marriage rite. The Marriage Act determined rules for the time, place, and registration of legal weddings, decreeing that the only valid form of English marriage was one “performed by an ordained priest according to the Anglican Liturgy in . . . the Established Church after thrice called banns or the purchase of a license from the bishop.” In doing so it terminated an older, ecclesiastical marriage code for which marriage had been, in essence, an exchange of vows performed before two witnesses. This shift from marriage loosely defined as a speech act to marriage defined and regulated through strict ceremonial requirements and bureaucratic procedures hardened the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate marriages and narrowed the forms and social meanings of marriage per se. Whereas the nuptial practices of the aristocracy, rural workers, and urban wage earners, for instance, had varied widely

The Theo-political Origins of the English Marriage Plot

My paper re-historicizes the eighteenth-century marriage plot by shifting attention away from both the history of literary genres and the modes of social history that have generally informed accounts of the rise of the novel. Drawing instead on recent historiography of the periods religious-political currents, I argue that the novels marriage plot emerged as both a cultural agent of the Erastian state and an expression of a highly labile, conservative, patriot opposition. It did so, therefore, as an English marriage plot which placed Anglican ritual and relations between vicars and squires at the heart of an imagined English nation. By returning a key tradition of the novel to its theo-political origins, and by offering an account of how marriage itself gained and retained intense topicality across the long eighteenth century in struggles between church and state, I show how the novels new marriage plot worked to place prose fiction at the center of the literary field and, by that move, radically to augment literatures social resonance.

Sir Charles Grandison, Natural Law and the Fictionalised English Gentleman

This article enquires into the relation between enlightened humanist conceptions of natural law and the period novels fictionalization of the English gentleman in the context of its marriage plot. Marriage played a key role in enlightened theorisations of natural law precisely as an institution capable of grounding familial and civil life in an emerging concept of human nature. Yet public debate about the states role in the regulation of marriage in mid-eighteenth-century England demonstrates that natural law lent itself to very different models of sovereignty and governance. The antinomies that characterized natural laws circulation in the English context are uniquely fictionalized in Samuel Richardsons last novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), a lengthy parallel narrative of failed courtship and matrimonial felicity that draws upon Pufendorfs model of natural law, yet is only partly implicated in its secular humanism. The novels eponymous gentleman hero – a ‘Man of Religion and Virtue’ – exemplifies a mix of Anglican piety, civic virtue and disinterested sympathy that is sanctioned by natural law and sealed by the English marriage plot.